Functionality

[William Mann]

Lets amplify the remarks of David Palfreyman.

We are talking about a socially important collection of processes here.

In legal practice,  honorific use of "The Court" to mean the judge, seems to
derive from this sort of thing.  The tendentious bickering over terms such
as pro-life, pro-choice, pro-abortion etc., the distinctions between
terrorist, revolutionary, freedom-fighter etc., the use in the family of
Daddy vs. Father,  all seem to be at least tangentially involved here.  If
we come to understand these processes, both in fleeting occurrence and in
retention,  it may be enlightening out of our linguistics and into our
general living.

Bill Mann

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Palfreyman" <David.Palfreyman at ZU.AC.AE>
To: <FUNKNET at listserv.rice.edu>
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 4:15 AM
Subject: Functionality


> Interesting discussion.  As someone recently steeped in the ideas of
Geertz and Foucault among others, two things struck me as particularly
interesting as I read through my last FUNKNET digest:
>
> a) The interpretative dimension of "functionality" which seems to come
into the later messages: e.g. Bill's idea of language users "tacitly or
consciously *find[ing]* some advantage in" an innovation (my emphasis), as
opposed to the innovation being *objectively* functional or not.
>
> b) The emphasis in Bill's and Dick's messages on social groups rather than
discourses.  To take the first loanword that comes to mind, I might use the
term "passe'" rather than "old-fashioned" because it forms part of a
discourse that I want to align myself with - or even to use ironically -
rather than because it is associated with a social *group* (unless it's a
social group defined just by those who use the word "passe'".  The same goes
for choosing between "student" and "learner" in education...
>
> Cheers,
> David Palfreyman
> Zayed University, Dubai
>
> :-D